Google Launches Beta Finance Service

Google Finance lets users search for and view companies' financial information, as well as related news and blogs.

Google announced on Tuesday the beta launch of Google Finance (www.google.com/finance), its first user-oriented financial Web site.

Google Finance lets users search for financial information, stock performance, and related news on public and private companies and mutual funds. Users can also supplement this info by viewing relevant blog postings and participating in financial discussions via Google's Group feature.

The Finance portal is geared toward North America for now, although it includes some content on additional markets, including those in Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon, Paris, and Toronto. Google says it has plans to integrate additional international financial information in the future.

The site has several features with interactive capabilities. A Company Search function lets users view a company's information by searching on the company name and or ticker symbol. Users can also access stock charts that map market data with corresponding news stories (tagged alphabetically), enabling them to track recent news to stock performance to determine potential correlations.

Users can click on and drag the interactive charts to view stock performance from different time periods and can zoom in or out to access more detailed information. The site lets users investigate performance hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually.

The Finance portal integrates Google's News service, grouping stories by topic rather than date, to make available a variety of different stories and opinions on the same subject.

The More News feature shows all news stories that have come out about a company over the past 90 days. It also includes Key Developments, as determined by Reuters over the past year.

Users can view stories by monthly date range or by importance, which Google determines via algorithms that take into account an article's relevance and popularity. A news volume chart shows the amount of news that has come out about a company each week over the past three months.

"We don't produce content, we aggregate content from multiple perspectives and extract the most relevant and up-to-date news results," said Katie Jacobs Stanton, senior product manager for Google. "We've provided a switchboard of financial data and news and we've also weaved in voices of bloggers because we think citizen journalists of the world have important things to say too."

Google Finance integrates related blog postings from the company's Blog Search function. In addition, users can connect with each other to talk finances, through Google-hosted Group Discussions.

The service, which is free to Google account holders, includes a Portfolio that lets users maintain and track their personal collection of stocks and mutual funds, including how many shares they own and at what price.